Getting More-Granular Data on Customer Journeys

Dating site Zoosk boasts 35 million users, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story — its members are playing the field with Zoosk as much as they are with their suitors. My company analyzed the online habits of people on popular dating sites, and while Zoosk users tend to be younger and fitter, they’re also 11.4 times more likely to search for other dating sites.

For Zoosk, that’s not just trivia or fodder for ad placements. It’s crucial insight into who the site’s customers are, what they do on other sites, and — most importantly — the journey they’re taking to Zoosk’s front door.

Companies typically build customer journey maps (CJMs) based on surveys, in-store activity, and users’ interactions on the brand website and app. But if you’re only watching users reach the finish line, you’re missing most of the race. To effectively target customers, you need to know what they’re doing before, during, and after their interactions with you.

While brands’ CJMs rely heavily on customer satisfaction surveys, surveys are notoriously unreliable, skewed by low participation rates, biased questions, and unreliable responses. In fact, high customer satisfaction scores may be the proverbial calm before the storm: Research shows 60-80 percent of customers claim to be satisfied with their banks right before they defect — a trend that holds across industries.

Even if surveys were useful, they couldn’t help you create meaningful customer personas. Nor can traditional site analytics, the other tool in most brands’ CJM tool kits. And without a holistic view of customers’ activities, it’s easy to make embarrassing assumptions.

Take a 2014 faux pas committed by Pinterest. Based on users’ pins, it sent congratulatory emails to individuals who had recently gotten engaged. In reality, it turned out many weren’t even in relationships, and they blasted Pinterest’s presumptuousness on social media. It was a real pie- (or wedding cake) in-the-face moment for the social media brand.

Had Pinterest not relied exclusively on its own site data, it might have deduced that these weren’t brides-to-be. As it learned the hard way, fragmented snapshots of customers’ online activities are just that: snapshots.

Mapping a customer journey is much like storyboarding. No single frame can make characters come alive; only a deep understanding of your customers can lead you from board to board, sketching out the adventure they take to your brand.

But what happens when your characters jump out of the frame and into a competitor’s world? Studies show that brands’ best customers routinely flirt with competitors. Even in the DIY home improvement industry — a sector with outstanding loyalty rates — companies’ top customers spend nearly 25 percent of their budget with other DIY businesses.

Traditional approaches to CJM are too limited to be effective, but you can build more meaningful maps:

Reverse-engineer social media remarketing. Customer matching services, such as those offered by Twitter and Facebook, enable you to create lookalike audiences that tell ad platforms which customers to target. Use these to determine whether — and how — social media plays a part in customers’ journeys.

Perhaps you’ve defined “people who’ve visited my website via mobile” as a group that should receive remarketing ads from Facebook and Twitter. Let’s say mobile users continuously land on your product page from Facebook, but not from Twitter. Facebook is an essential stop along your customers’ journeys, but Twitter isn’t. As a result, you might scrap your Twitter campaign and focus on Facebook.

Recruit some brand detectives. Consumers’ trust in brandsis at an all-time low, which is a big reason survey feedback isn’t useful. But there’s another tool at your disposal that makes the most of consumers’ trust in their peers: social media influencers. People let their guard down around personalities they trust, and tools such as BuzzSumo and Klout can identify bloggers who’ll go underground for your brand.

Choose influencers in spheres where followers are likely to be familiar with your company. If you’re a restaurant brand, for instance, look to food and beverage influencers. Ask followers’ opinions: Have they bought from you in the past? Did they order online or go to a physical store? What led them to choose you over a competitor?

Follow the Yellow Click Road.Clickstream analysis indicates where people were before they arrived on a site, what they did on that site, and where they’re headed after they leave. Some offer audience features that lend insight into site visitors’ geographic location, age, sex, and education level. Others get even more granular and offer entire path-to-purchase data and behavioral segmentation based on click activity.

Couple demographic insights with information gleaned from clickstreams — such as customers’ interests, social media habits, and purchase behavior — to create a truer “typical customer” persona. With a broad view of your customers’ lives, you can create more relevant messaging.

Hitch a ride with ad retargeting. When we analyzed back-to-school shopping activity, we learned that consumers click through an average of five websites per Google search before they buy. To determine which competitors your customers are befriending, integrate cookies or tracking pixels into your ads.

If Staples, for instance, wanted to know where its customers searched for laptops, so it could retarget laptop ads to follow customers elsewhere online. Some users — say, on Best Buy’s or Target’s site — will click, returning to Staples’ website from competitors’ pages. Taken in aggregate, this tells Staples which brands are its top competitors.

Customer journey mapping was once a simple endeavor — a customer might see your TV ad and drive to your store. Since e-commerce has reached its zenith, however, the customer journey is no longer a straight road: It’s a circuitous web, taking customers from social media to your site to competitors’ sites and back again.

To truly connect with customers, you can’t rely on survey data or back-end web analytics. If your brand wants to be their final destination, it needs a new storyboard that includes every part of the story.

Deren Baker is the CEO of Jumpshot, a San Francisco-based startup that offers marketing analytics solutions tailored for the travel, retail, media, financial, and e-commerce industries. He previously held senior roles at Travelocity and Switchfly.